News

Mix: iDog, iPod mishaps, shuffle songs, Podcast shootout

By LC Angell ● Sunday, January 23, 2005

Sega’s iDog is an iPod-inspired pet robot. “Seven LEDs on the face express emotion, while an audio jack under the right hind leg let’s you plug in your iPod (or other audio player) to broadcast through iDog’s speaker.”

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Comments

1

Regarding the Apple ear buds, I am not sure why people would want to wear them. I have never been able to keep the stock ear buds in my ears, or derive any true listening pleasure from the audio quality they manage to produce.

I realize that not everyone is the same, but I was dissatisfied with the stock ear buds, and now use an in-ear model from another manufacturer.

I suppose that I would also dislike being immediately identified as having an iPod due to my ear buds, especially at certain train stations.

Posted by LC Angell on January 24, 2005 at 8:27 AM (CST)

1

The article on the randomness of Ipod’s shuffle feature reminds me of the new CBS cop show that premiered last night. During the show, the lead character, who is a genius mathemetician(sp?), asked a group of people to disperse in random fashion. He noted that everyone spread out at somewhat measured distances. This is probably most people’s view of random-spread out all over the place. However, he noted that clusters will occur at random in a sample. Seems like a fair analogy to the shuffle feature. I have a 40GB 4g and a gold mini. My mini seems to be all over the map with long gaps between multiple songs by a single artist. My 40GB always seems to include a Starch Martins or Smithereens song causing me to wonder whether it was truly random. Since I don’t use the shuffle function all that much, my sample is not sufficiently large to draw any statistical relevance from. However, I bet that if you tried the shuffle function a thousand times, you’d find no pattern. I’ll stop my blather now…

Posted by LC Angell on January 24, 2005 at 8:43 AM (CST)

1

The iPod’s “random” may be clinically random, but I have the same issue of hearing the same artist (or worse, the same song) during shuffle play, esp. after resetting the iPod or adding music. I keep a smart playlist (<last played> <is not in the last> <12> <months>) to take care of that.

Posted by LC Angell on January 24, 2005 at 9:48 AM (CST)

1

For the iPod loaders, does iTunes rip multiple CDs simultaneously (as long as they are attached to the machine)? I ended up doing a bunch of ripping Sunday (for my Dad!) and it was a godsend to be able to use Media Center’s simultaneous multi-ripping (I have 4 CDs & DVDs attached to the HTPC). I guess you could also rip over a network from optical drives shared out and mapped locally (under Windows), but that would be really slow!

Posted by LC Angell on January 24, 2005 at 12:54 PM (CST)

1

I always play my iPod on random (shuffle). However, everytime I charge it up (every couple of days) it ‘goes back to the beginning’ and starts the shuffle process over again. In other words, any songs already played go back into the shuffle system Any way around this?

Posted by LC Angell on January 24, 2005 at 5:46 PM (CST)

1

Does anyone know of a way to use the shuffle option for just one (1) artist rather than the entire library?

(I have the U2 complete library and would love to just listen to them at random, no Hillary Duff, my daughter’s—I swear!, thrown in.)